


Boston

by devovitsuasartes



Category: Call Me By Your Name - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Depression, Loneliness, M/M, Reunions, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-22
Updated: 2018-03-04
Packaged: 2019-03-22 13:50:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 16,417
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13765482
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/devovitsuasartes/pseuds/devovitsuasartes
Summary: Elio goes away to college and struggles to deal with loneliness.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I did a different take on Elio and Oliver's lives down the line called [Americano](http://archiveofourown.org/works/13354341/chapters/30577701), in which Oliver has a happy marriage and Elio moves on from him in a healthy way and the two of them stay friendly. This is... not that.

I didn’t discover loneliness until I went away to college. I had always loved the solitude of reading or listening to music or even just lounging around and marinating in my own thoughts. I blamed Oliver, for awakening loneliness in me. It was as though he had come along and uncovered a secret room in me that I had never noticed before, and filled it with joy for a few short weeks, and then boarded it up behind him when he left. When I left my parents and my high school friends behind and headed for Boston, I found myself without friends or family for the first time, and became keenly aware of that cavity inside me - that empty, boarded-up room.

It wasn’t as though there were no new friends to be made. I got on well with my fellow students, and went out for drinks with them after class, and I laughed and chatted with them easily. But as soon as we went our separate ways I felt that ache of loneliness return, unsatiated. I curled my body up around it at night, in the single bed of the studio apartment my parents had rented for me. It crept out into my music, filling every song with minor keys.

He had gotten married. My parents attended the wedding. I stayed at home, studying for my final exams, burying myself in my notes even though I had already been accepted to the New England Conservatory. I had a strange notion that Oliver could see me, somehow, and I wanted him to see nothing but a good student hunched over his desk, highlighting passages in his textbook and taking careful notes. I didn’t want him to see me lying in bed, staring up at the ceiling blankly, wondering if now - at that very moment - he was being told, _you may kiss the bride_ , and doing so happily.

I developed a taste for rough, impersonal sex - mostly with men, mostly older men. There was one man I saw pretty regularly. I had met him outside a nightclub and he had teasingly called me a twink, a label that I hated. I took him back to my apartment and fucked him hard, spitefully, and then later he did the same to me. He twisted his fingers viciously in my hair and yanked on it, and I came so hard that I was left shaking for about a minute afterwards.

The sex I had at college was so different from what I’d had with Oliver that it felt like another act entirely. Oliver had looked in my eyes, touched my cheek, kissed me deeply, whispered wonderful things to me while he moved between my legs and I desperately pulled him closer. With people who were not Oliver, any of those things felt inauthentic and saccharine, and so I twisted my face away from kisses and begged men to use me, to simply take what they needed, and they were usually all too happy to oblige.

In the morning, when I would wake up alone, I would drum my fingers on my bare, sticky stomach and think to myself, _You’ve ruined me, Oliver. You’ve messed me up. Just like you were afraid you would_. But it was a clinical thought, devoid of emotion. I didn’t feel ashamed after sex any more. It was just something that I did - like eating breakfast, or brushing my teeth.

If nothing else, I was at least vigilant about using protection. That past summer, at the villa, I had come down from breakfast one morning to find my father reading a French newspaper with an uncharacteristically sorrowful expression, my mother standing behind him, reading over his shoulder and looking equally troubled.

“What’s up?” I’d asked.

My father sighed, folded the newspaper, and handed it to me. “Poor man,” he’d said. “Such a brilliant mind. What a loss.”

I looked down at the page and was alarmed to see a face I recognized. Michel Foucault, who was a personal acquaintance of my parents, had passed away, and his death was rumored to have been brought on by AIDS. I could vaguely recall meeting him at one party or another, and had written a paper on his work for school the previous year. He was the first person that I actually knew who had died from the disease - though, sadly, he would not be the last.

Foucault’s death may well have saved my life. I had not given much thought to the risks of sex when I was with Oliver, and we had never used a condom. At the time there was no test for the disease - you only found out you had it when you started dying. And so my insistence upon using condoms with other men was born less out of fear that I might contract AIDS, and more out of a quiet certainty that I was carrying it already. After all, I felt like I had been infected with _something_. I wondered if perhaps the ennui that plagued me since that summer was actually my body sensing the approach of death.

When the test finally became available, in my second year of college, I went out and took it at the earliest possibility. It was negative. I was overwhelmed by the relief, but it was more for Oliver than it was for myself. I could only have gotten it from him, so if I had tested positive, it would have meant that Oliver was dying too.

I had told my parents I was getting tested, and I called them up with the good news straight away. I considered writing to Oliver as well - burying the information at the bottom of a general letter of pleasantries and updates on my education and inquiries about his life. Just a little note at the bottom - _by the way, in case you were wondering or worried, I got tested and I’m fine_. It would be the kind thing to do, to set his mind at ease in case he had thought of me while reading those terrible headlines.

But I never wrote the letter. The consideration of it awoke doubt in me - doubt in my recollections of that summer. At the time it had seemed like a grand, enormous, all-encompassing thing, but I had a flair for melodrama and exaggeration that so often came with a creative mind. What if, I wondered, this deep and powerful romance had been entirely my own invention? What if Oliver had not spared a single thought for me since he called to let me know that he was getting married? What if that very phone call had been his way of telling me to back off, to grow up, to leave him alone for good? What if Oliver had never really cared for me at all?

I fluctuated between thinking that such a thing was impossible and believing it to be true with an absolute certainty. Oliver had just been a horny guy on holiday who had fucked the nearest available person - who just so happened to be the son of his hosts, living conveniently in the next room. And I, being the high-strung 17 year-old that I was, had gotten carried away and dreamed up an epic love story that had not ever really existed.

I took a kind of vicious pleasure in the thought. I imagined myself telling the story to people, though I never actually did such a thing. _Oh, it was so embarrassing_ , my imagined version of myself laughed self-deprecatingly, surrounded by a table full of thrilled listeners. _I was completely obsessed with this poor guy. Followed him around like a puppy dog, thinking we were like Romeo and Juliet. And all he wanted was to get laid_.

So confident was I in this account that by the time I saw Oliver again, I had cultivated a kind of hatred for him - or at least, the cruel and arrogant fictionalized version of him. It didn’t help that I was caught off-guard. I was at a fundraising party for the college, being trotted around like a show pony by my tutors and introduced to wealthy donors, shaking hands and smiling. Then I turned and, in the crowd, I saw Oliver. He was chatting animatedly with one of the Deans, and he had his arm casually around the waist of a lovely woman whose modest dress was distended a little by pregnancy.

It was like a lump of ice had been suddenly teleported into my stomach. I knew that he was from New England - he had told me as much - but quite understandably I had never actually expected to run into him. Yet here he was, barely changed, only perhaps a little squarer around the jaw and a little broader across the shoulders.

I had longed to see him again for years. Now, I dreaded the thought of him spotting me. I could not talk to him. I could not make pleasantries. I could not chit-chat. I felt sick, _sick_. I quickly looked away, terrified that he might catch someone staring at him in his peripheral vision and turn around to see who it was. I ducked into the crowd, moved around the nearest corner so that I would be hidden from view, and then fled the party without bothering to grab my coat - which had both my keys and wallet in its pocket - from the cloakroom.

Once I got away, I wandered aimlessly for a while, and then finally used the spare change in my trouser pocket to call up a guy I had been seeing. I asked him if I could come over to his place.

“It’s pretty late,” he said, after a pause. “You sound weird. You’re not having some kind of crisis, are you?”

The distaste in his voice filled me with an odd kind of relief. “I wouldn’t be calling _you_ if I was having a crisis,” I replied rudely.

He laughed, and told me to come over.

I traipsed back to the party a couple of hours later, just as the last few people were leaving. My hair was mussed and my clothes were rumpled, and I didn’t care. I picked up my coat and pulled my pack of cigarettes out of the pocket while I was still putting it on, ignoring the cloakroom attendant’s raised eyebrows. I lit a cigarette on my way out of the building, and then sat down on a low wall, wincing a little at the after-effects of the night’s rough treatment. My whole body ached. I breathed out a haze of smoke and looked up at the stars through it.

“Elio?”

I wasn’t surprised at all. It was inevitable. I shouldn’t have stopped. I should have walked out and just kept walking.

Oliver was standing at the bottom of the steps leading down from the building, his wife at his side, his coat around her shoulders and his arm protectively around her waist. I waited for the same panic I had felt earlier to engulf me, and was pleased when it didn’t. It still worked, then: having sex with someone else to numb my feelings for Oliver.

“Oliver,” I greeted, the tip of my cigarette wagging up and down as I spoke without taking it out of my mouth.

He looked utterly stunned, and a little concerned. Perhaps I looked more debauched than I had realized. “Were you at the fundraiser? I didn’t see you.”

“Left early,” I explained casually, hopping down off the wall. “Came back for my coat.” Since Oliver seemed to have been shocked out of his manners, I covered for him by holding out my hand to his wife. “Elio Perlman.”

“Oh,” she said, the confusion clearing from her forehead and leaving an expression of understanding. “You’re Sammy and Annella’s son!”

“Guilty as charged.”

“I’ve heard so much about you!” She didn’t say whether she had heard about me from Oliver, or from my parents. I assumed the latter.

“Mostly good things, I hope.”

“All good things. So nice to meet you.”

I smiled - the big, false smile that I had learned to put on at my parent’s gatherings, when I was forced to socialize. Then, abruptly, I said, “Wish I could stay and chat, but I’m kind of exhausted. Better head home. Good to see you again, Oliver. Nice to meet you…” I realized that, since Oliver had never gotten around to introducing us, I still didn’t know his wife’s name.

She told me, filling in the hanging end of my sentence. I forgot the name almost immediately. I spared a glance at Oliver, whose expression was unguarded and somewhat distraught, then turned away and started walking with a slight spring in my step, feeling strangely elated. I relished the soreness in my muscles, the lazy satiety of the recently-fucked. I didn’t care about my wrinkled clothes and messy hair. I didn’t care what he thought of them. I didn’t care, I didn’t care, I didn’t care.

“Elio!”

Footsteps behind me, jogging. I slowed down, but kept walking for several more paces - out of spite, more than anything else - before I finally stopped and turned. Oliver caught up to me, a little out of breath.

“Oliver,” I greeted again. I looked over his shoulder. “Where’s…?” Shit, I really had forgotten her name.

“Oh, she’s waiting in the car. She’s been on her feet all night. I said I just wanted to make sure you were OK.”

I blinked at him, feigning polite befuddlement. “Do I not seem OK?”

“Elio!” He laughed - exasperated, not amused. He opened his mouth to say something, then hesitated, then at last continued, “You don’t seem very surprised to see me.”

I shrugged.

He frowned, then pulled a face and jerked his shoulders in a little mockery of my shrug. He was starting to get pissed off. “Are you drunk?” he ventured.

“I’m fine. Just tired, like I said. I’ll see you around.” I turned away from him, suddenly eager to escape.

“‘See you around’?” he quoted disbelievingly, reaching out and grabbing my shoulder - the first time he’d touched me in over three years. “Just wait. Stop walking away from me.”

“What do you want from me, Oliver?” I asked, wearily.

“I want to invite you over for dinner,” he said, brandishing the offer like a challenge. “I’m not just here visiting. I got offered a teaching post at Harvard.”

I softened a little at that. “Congratulations,” I said, quietly. “Really, that’s wonderful news.”

He nodded, relaxing a little as well. “We bought a house in Cambridge. We’re still fixing it up a little, but the kitchen works fine. Please, Elio. Come over for dinner. I promised your father I’d reach out to you once we got settled in.”

I was just starting to waver when he said that last part, and my body went cold again. _I promised your father_. So, his desperation - his chasing me down the street - was all just in service of a promise to someone else.

“Thank you for the offer,” I replied stiffly. “But I don’t think that would be a good idea.”

Oliver’s face clouded in anger, then. “You’re acting like a child,” he snapped. “I haven’t done anything wrong, Elio.”

I had been ready for him to say something like that. “Have you told her about us?” I asked.

His expression was answer enough.

“So what you _actually_ want me to do is come over to your house and lie to your wife for you.”

“Oh for god’s sake. I’m not asking you to lie…”

“Alright, then. So if she asks me about that summer, I should tell her about what we did every night.”

“Or you could behave like a civilized human being, and…”

“Lie?”

“Leave those parts out!”

But he seemed to know that he was defeated. His arms were folded across his chest - partly as a defense against the cold, and partly as a defense against my accusations. He looked angry still, but also very upset, and the sight made me a little sick to my stomach.

“Like I said,” I replied at last. “I don’t think it would be a good idea.” I considered saying _later_ , but it would be too familiar, too much like an inside joke. “Goodnight, Oliver.”

I walked away. This time, he didn’t follow me.


	2. Chapter 2

After the night that we ran into each other, Oliver didn’t reach out to me again. Still, I was on edge at the thought that he was living just a few miles away - paranoid that I might run into him at the grocery store, or the book store, or my favorite coffee shop, or even come home to find him on my doorstep. I buried myself in my music and my schoolwork, bribing one of the Conservatory’s janitors to look the other way so that I could use one of the practice rooms at night - playing piano until my back ached from sitting on the hard bench, and eventually passing out on the worn old couch, covered only by my jacket. I would wake up and stumble to class, unwashed and unfed, clutching a cup of black coffee like it was my only lifeline.

Shortly before the spring break, my piano tutor took me quietly to one side and asked if anything was wrong. I stared at her blankly.

“My grades are fine. Better than fine,” I replied, defensive.

“I know they are, Elio,” she said gently. “You practice more than any other student I’ve taught. But you seem so tired, and you never smile any more. And your music…”

She didn’t quite know what to say about my music, but I knew what she meant. All of the songs I had written and presented in assessments were achingly sad. They were intricate and moving and they were graded well, but they practically wept pain, and I shouldn’t have been surprised that my tutor had noticed the pattern.

“You know there are people you can talk to, if you’re having a hard time,” my tutor said, changing tack.

 _There’s no one I can talk to_ , I thought. But aloud I said, “I know, I will.” And forced a smile onto my face.

My parents noticed, when I went home for the break. They were not worriers by nature, and had always trusted me to figure out my own troubles. My mother didn’t cluck and nag about the dark circles under my eyes, or the fact that I’d lost weight. But I noticed her exchanging glances with my father at breakfast, when I would sit silently and take small bites of toast, staring down at the table.

I had been home for three days when my father brought up Oliver. “I told him to look you up when he moved to Cambridge,” he said gently, standing in the doorway of the living room. Not a question. Just a statement.

I was curled up on the couch with a book. I didn’t look up. “Yes, he said.”

“Do you two see each other much?”

“No, not really.” I hadn’t seen him since the night of the fundraiser.

My father didn’t say anything for a while after that, and eventually I looked up at him to gauge his response. He was wearing an expression of quiet sorrow.

“I’m always here,” he said at last. “If you want to talk.”

I considered putting on a brave face and pretending I was fine, but I didn’t want to lie to my father. “I know. I think I just need to figure this out for myself.”

During the break I ran into my high school English teacher, who had always said I was one of his favorite students, and we ended up going back to his place and having sex. I heard him crying in the bathroom afterwards. I wondered if he had wanted to fuck me when I was his student - if he had ever really admired me for my work ethic and my intelligence, or if that had just been code for his lust. When he eventually came out of the bathroom he apologized, and begged me not to tell anyone. I left his apartment feeling numb and detached from my own body.

After that I threw myself even deeper into my music. I stopped going out for drinks with friends, stopped lounging about and reading in coffee shops, even stopped seeking out new sexual partners. I hunched over my guitar and over the piano, pushing myself to learn more complex pieces, to play better and faster and with greater precision. I cursed myself bitterly when I messed up, assigned myself an extra fifteen minutes of practice for every fumbled note. It didn’t make me happy, but it kept me busy.

That year marked the first time in my life that I didn’t go to the villa for the summer. I had already been planning to stay in Boston for a few days after my parents headed out there, since I had been entered for a prestigious music competition by one of my tutors. Then, shortly before summer vacation, my mother called me with some news.

“Oliver will be coming to stay with us over the summer, with his family. Just for a week.”

I leaned against the wall by the phone, staring blankly across my apartment at the posters on the wall and my rumpled, unmade bed and the music notes scattered over my desk. “That’s good,” I said at last. “I mean, it’ll be nice for him to go back.”

“He did seem very happy there,” my mother agreed. There was a pause. Then she added, “They’re coming at the start of July, so if you…”

“I actually don’t think I’ll be able to make it this summer,” I interrupted, a strange kind of panic rising in my throat. “I’ve got a lot of reading to do, and I need to practice.”

It was an absurd excuse, of course. The villa had a grand piano and an abundance of good reading spots. But my mother didn’t call me on it. We both knew the real reason I was backing out.

“Not even at the end of the holidays?” she asked, meaning, _not even after Oliver has left?_

I screwed my face up and closed my eyes, suddenly fighting back tears. “No. I’m sorry.”

I couldn’t be there when Oliver was there. I couldn’t sleep in the room next door and listen to him have sex with his wife in the same bed where we’d once fucked each other like we’d die if we stopped. I couldn’t visit afterwards, and sleep in my own room, because even though Mafalda would change the sheets I’d be able to smell him, sense him, feel the just-gone warmth of him. I could picture it so clearly - Oliver at the lake, with his wife, and his baby. Her sitting with the infant on her lap and smiling as she watched him play volleyball. And me, on the sidelines, watching with an expression of twisted bitterness and jealousy, Oliver spotting me and offering me an embarrassed, conciliatory half-smile…

“I’m sorry,” I said again. “I just… I’m so busy.” Liar. _Liar_.

I placed first in the music competition, with one of Chopin’s _ballades_. I felt nothing when I won, but during the performance - on stage in front of a hushed audience, my fingers dancing over the keys - I found a strange kind of quiet in the ebb and flow of the notes. It was as though I could only find peace when I was playing, and as soon as my fingers left the keys the ugly din of my thoughts came flooding back.

So engrossed was I in my music that I almost forgot about Oliver’s stay at the villa, until the phone rang one day in July. I glanced at the caller ID, recognized the country code for Italy, and answered with a casual, “Pronto.”

“ _Elio?_ ”

My heart hammered in my chest at the sound of his voice. I pretended not to know who it was.

“Sì.”

“ _It’s Oliver_.”

“Oh, hello.”

“ _Why aren’t you here?_ ”

I was a little taken aback by his abruptness. I had expected him to offer pleasantries and formalities first, but he sounded angry - like he’d spent half a day fuming before making this phone call. “In Italy?” I stalled.

“ _Yes, in Italy, why aren’t you in Italy?_ ” he clarified sarcastically.

“I’m busy.”

I heard a rush of static as he sighed down the phone. “ _Is this because of me?_ ”

“Am I busy because of you?”

“ _Don’t play games. You should be here, Elio. Your parents miss you. They’re worried about you. If you didn’t want to see me you could have just asked me not to come.._.”

“Oliver, you’re raving,” I interrupted coldly. “Not everything is about you.”

Liar. _Liar._

I heard him make a noise at the other end of the phone - an exhausted, frustrated, despairing sound. I closed my eyes in misery.

“ _I hate that it’s like this between us_ ,” he said at last. “ _I miss you._ ”

 _Liar_ , I thought again, but even in my own head I sounded unconvinced.

“ _I just want to..._ ”

But then he stopped, and I immediately knew why. He had cut himself off in the way that people cut themselves off when someone has just entered the room, and they don’t want to risk being overheard. Suddenly I could picture him - as clearly as if he was sitting right in front of me. He was in the hallway, surely, sat in the same chair where I’d sat on the day he told me he was getting married. And just now he’d been about to tell me something, but his wife had walked into the hallway - perhaps looking for him, perhaps just passing through.

Amid the silence, I did one of the most satisfying things I had ever done in my life: I hung up on him.

I felt elated afterwards. I smiled for the first time in what felt like months, and then I grabbed my coat and walked out of the door before Oliver could realize I’d hung up on him and call back.

 

* * *

 

“You seem better,” my piano tutor said, when I returned in the fall. “Did you talk to someone, like I said?”

“Yes. I talked to someone.”

I had assumed that, after I hung up the phone on him, Oliver would finally let me go and want nothing more to do with me. It was a total shock, then, when I was woken one Saturday morning shortly after the start of the new semester by a hard rapping at my door. I tried to ignore it at first, thinking perhaps it was someone trying to sell something - insurance, perhaps, or religion. But the rapping at the door continued until I knew I had to do something about it or face complaints from the neighbors.

I staggered blearily to the door and opened it, then froze with my mouth open as I prepared to complain about the noise. Oliver was standing in front of me, his lips pressed together in one of his subtle expressions of deep anger. He slammed his hand down over the door frame, as though he was afraid I would try to shut him out.

“Oliver?” I croaked, wondering if perhaps I was still dreaming. He looked unfairly gorgeous - his tanned skin slightly flushed, his hair a little rumpled, the top few buttons of his shirt undone so that his Star of David was on display, nestled in his chest hair. “What are you doing here?”

“I needed to see you.”

“Why?”

“Because I can’t stand the thought of never seeing you again, and you seem determined to avoid me, and this is the only thing I could think of.”

I was acutely embarrassed about how messy my apartment was, but I could hardly leave him on the doorstep. I sighed and scrubbed a hand over my face, then backed up from the doorway. “I’ll put on some coffee.”

As I busied myself in the kitchenette, Oliver stood in the center of my apartment and turned slowly on the spot, taking in the art on the walls and the clothes strewn over furniture and the books scattered everywhere.

“So this is what happens when Mafalda isn’t around to pick up after you.”

“If you don’t like it, you can leave.”

I turned just in time to see him wince at the coldness in my voice, and suddenly I felt guilty. What, after all, had Oliver actually done wrong? He didn’t want me, but he couldn’t help that. It wasn’t a crime to not want someone.

Leaning back against the countertop, waiting for the coffee to brew, I regarded him carefully. “How was Italy?”

Oliver relaxed minutely. “Beautiful,” he admitted. “I wish we could have stayed longer.”

 _We_. I suddenly realized that I’d never congratulated him on the birth of his child. I’d heard about it from my mother. He had a little boy. I wondered if the baby looked like him, if it had his blond hair.

“You should have been there,” Oliver continued, his voice soft and sad.

I considered repeating the lie about being too busy, but I was tired of lying and the coffee was done. I said nothing, and turned my back on him while I busied myself with making two cups - adding just a little cream to his, the way he liked it.

“Are you OK?”

The question came just I was handing Oliver his coffee, avoiding his gaze, and it surprised me enough that I finally looked up at him, into a face full of genuine concern.

“You just seem so… different. You don’t seem happy.”

I shrugged indifferently. “There are worse things to be than unhappy. I don’t know why you care.”

“Really? You don’t know?” He sighed in frustration. “What do you want from me, Elio?”

That question brought my anger rushing back at last. “What do you want from _me_?" I demanded. “All I have tried to do is to leave you alone. To stay out of your life.”

“I never wanted you out of my life.”

“You _left_ ,” I accused, my voice shaking a little with fury. _You left, and you moved on and you forgot about me almost immediately. It has been three years and I haven’t been able to move on from you, and you did it in a few months. You have a wife and a family, and I have nothing and nobody._

I wondered why he was even here. A thought occurred to me that he had come here for sex, and though such a thought might once have excited me, now it turned my stomach. Some of the older men I’d slept with had, I felt quite sure, been married. They saw me, my body, as a brief escape from their lives - an outlet for their lust, for the sexuality that they’d repressed. Was Oliver here to use me for sex, because he knew I wouldn’t say no? _Could_ I say no to him, if he moved closer, if he cupped my cheek and kissed me right now?

But Oliver didn’t look like he was in the mood for kissing. He walked over to the couch slowly, and sank down into it, staring into his cup.

“I couldn’t have stayed,” he said at last, so quietly that I could barely hear him. “I had to leave. You know that.”

“But you could have waited. I would have waited for you. I did wait for you. I thought you… I thought that I mattered.”

“Mattered?” Oliver echoed. “God, Elio, of course you matter. Do you have any idea how much I- stop shaking your head!”

“I don’t need your pity!”

“It’s not pity, I _love_ you, Elio!”

He covered his mouth after he said it, shocked, like he couldn’t believe the words had been spoken aloud. I stared at him, a buzzing noise in my ears. But I didn’t relent.

“Then why did you get married?”

Oliver took his hand away from his mouth. I was standing over him now, and he looked so vulnerable.

“Maybe I shouldn’t have,” he said at last, hushed.

It should have made me happy. It didn’t. I was disgusted, and angry. “You need to go.”

And finally, he did.


	3. Chapter 3

Knowing that Oliver loved me - loved me then, loved me still - did at least cure me of some of my torment, but it didn’t make me happy. After all, it changed nothing. He was still married, still a father, still out of my reach. I would not have had sex with him even if he had asked. I would rather go the rest of my life without touching Oliver, than have him touch me in a way that would cause him shame.

One positive side to my frantic addiction to work and study was that I graduated from the Conservatory a year early. I was offered a teaching assistant position afterwards, and I took it - jumping into a masters degree as well. It was as much about delaying adulthood as it was about attaining another qualification; at 21, I still didn’t know who I wanted to be.

That year I also finally took advantage of the counseling services offered by the college. After my first session, when I confessed how bad things had been since I left home, the counselor offered to refer me to a psychiatrist so that I could get a prescription for antidepressants, but I recoiled from the idea of medicating myself. Depression was common at the Conservatory - an institution full of talented people, constantly pushing themselves or being pushed by their parents - and I’d heard that the drugs dulled emotion, made you numb. I didn’t want that. If there was pain, I wanted to feel it.

I had just turned 22 when I saw Oliver again. I was out with a group of students - all freshmen, all bright and eager - who treated me like some kind of rock star, because of all the prestigious competition wins I had racked up. It was strange, this experience of being looked up to. Growing up, I had been used to always being the youngest person in the room - the person whom no one listened to or paid much attention to. The circle of fascinated expressions and the barrage of questions were strange, a little exciting, a little intimidating.

We were three rounds deep, and I was starting to feel a little wobbly, when I saw Oliver across the bar. I hadn’t seen him come in, and he apparently hadn’t spotted me yet. He didn’t seem to be aware of anything in his environment, in fact. He was slumped over the bar, staring down blankly into a glass of what looked like whisky. There were at least two other glasses by his elbow.

At first I tried to ignore him, but he kept drawing my gaze. Something was wrong, I could tell. Even in the dim light, from a distance, I could see that he was upset. His hair and clothes were rumpled, his expression pained. I bit my lip, cursed myself for not being stronger, and excused myself from the table.

“Oliver.”

He looked up at me when I said his name. His eyes were red-rimmed and a little unfocused.

“Elio?” He was drunk.

“What are you doing here, Oliver?” It was late, and a weeknight. Married fathers were not supposed to be out late on a weeknight, getting drunk alone.

He peered into his glass. When he spoke, his voice was hollow. “Ordering another one of these,” he replied, the syllables slurred. “In a minute.”

“Seems like you’ve had enough of those already.”

He shook his head. “Not nearly enough,” he said. “Not nearly enough.”

“Something’s wrong,” I concluded. “What is it, Oliver?”

“Why are you here?” he whispered.

“Why are _you_ here?”

“I’m staying in a hotel. I can’t go back there. To that room.”

I stared at him, dumbfounded. “Why…?”

“I cheated on her. I slept with someone else. One of my students.”

 _Oh, god_. “Oliver…”

“I wanted to quit. I wanted to admit what I’d done and just quit, but I need the money. We’ve got the mortgage, and Josh is starting pre-school soon, and I need… there’ll be lawyers…”

“Oliver, stop!” I grabbed the glass as he raised it to his mouth again, forced it down to the bar. On the edges of my vision, I could see the group of students I’d come with staring at us. I needed to get out of here, and get Oliver out of here.

If this even _was_ Oliver. He was unrecognizable from the confident young man who had come to stay with us that summer, and who had navigated our feelings for one another so carefully - so afraid of doing something wrong. _I know myself_ , he’d said, after the first time we kissed. Was this why he had stopped? Was this what he had been afraid of? Had he had this darkness inside him all along?

“Which hotel are you staying at?” I asked him firmly.

“I can’t go back there…”

“Well, you have to. The bar will be closing soon, and I’m not bringing you back to my place.” I tugged at his elbow. “Come on. Let’s go.”

I’d expected resistance, but instead he slumped against me, buried his face against my shoulder. I staggered, taking his weight with difficulty. When I was sure that I had him, I pulled him off the stool, let him lean on me. I waved apologetically to my students as I guided Oliver out of the door.

I called us a cab, and while we waited for it I finally managed to extract the name of the hotel from Oliver. I gave it to the driver, who thankfully knew where it was. Oliver slumped against the door as soon as he got in the cab and passed out, breathing deep and heavy. I wiped a hand down my face, slapped my cheek a couple of times, trying to sober up.

I’d thought it would be difficult to get Oliver out of the cab, but as soon as we arrived he opened his door and vomited onto the sidewalk. I winced and apologized to the driver, but he seemed relieved that Oliver had at least been able to hold it in for the journey. I tipped him anyway, then slung Oliver’s arm around my shoulder and half-dragged him into the hotel.

It was a cheap, nasty place. There was no one on the desk, and Oliver didn’t respond when I asked him which room he was in, so in the end I had to fish his key out of his coat pocket and check the number on it.

Finally, I got him back to his room. A suitcase was open on the floor, clothes spilling out of it, and the minibar had been left standing open.

“Fuck,” Oliver sighed, his breath hot on my ear. “I hate this place.”

I carefully levered him off my shoulder and dropped him onto the bed. He lay back, his hands on his stomach, his eyes closed.

“You need to drink some water,” I told him. “And take some aspirin, or you’re not going to be able to move tomorrow. Do you have any aspirin.”

“Suitcase,” he mumbled.

In the end I had to force him to sit up, and put the pills on his tongue, and tip the glass of water against his mouth. Even as pitiful as he was, the touch of my fingers to his lips stirred something inside of me. He was so lovely. Drunk, miserable, stained with vomit - even like this, he was lovely. Without giving it much thought, I stroked his hair, my thumb just brushing his temple.

He gazed at me, childlike. Then he asked, softly, “Are you really here?”

“Yes. I’m really here.”

“I thought maybe I imagined you.”

“You’re not _that_ drunk.”

“I ruined everything, Elio.”

I had no answer for that. I wished that I could reassure him, but what was there to say? I didn’t have the words to make him feel better, and I couldn’t bring myself to scold him. He had done a terrible thing, but I couldn’t muster up any kind of disgust or moral condemnation - only pity, which he did not deserve.

I made him drink the rest of the glass of water, then helped him out of his shoes - carefully unlacing them, and pulling them off his feet, remembering when he had sandwiched my toes between his toes all those years ago, and suddenly wishing that I could go back to that moment and warn him. _Don’t get married_ , I would tell him if I could. _Wait for me. Wait until we can be together._

Once his feet were free, he lay down. I picked up my coat from where I had tossed it onto the bed, but he grabbed my wrist before I could leave.

“Stay,” he breathed. “Please, just stay with me for tonight.”

I hesitated. “I’ll stay,” I agreed. “But I don’t want to do anything.”

I took off my own shoes, lined them up neatly next to his. His eyes followed me as I walked around to the other side of the bed and climbed in next to him. I was a little on edge - worried that he would try to kiss me, and worried that I would not have the strength of will to push him away. But he merely looked at me, unselfconsciously, as though he still didn’t quite believe that I was real.

“Oliver,” he murmured, finally closing his eyes.

I tensed. The act of calling me by his name felt more intimate than a kiss, more intimate even than sex. I wanted to yell at him, tell him that he had no right to do that. Not any more. But he was already asleep and, before long, I was too.

 

* * *

 

He called me a few days later.

“I’m so sorry,” he said, as soon as we’d exchanged greetings. “You shouldn’t have had to deal with that.”

“I’m glad I was there,” I assured him, truthfully. “I don’t think you’d have made it back to your hotel without me.”

“I shouldn’t have gotten so drunk. I keep making things worse.”

I leaned back against the wall and closed my eyes. I wished that it didn’t hurt me so much, to hear the sorrow in his voice. I wished, more than anything, that I didn’t care about Oliver. But I did, and there was no changing it.

“Elio.”

“Yes?”

“I hate myself for asking this. I just… I don’t have anyone else. Our friends aren’t speaking to me any more. My colleagues don’t know what happened. There’s no one else…”

“You can’t stay with me, Oliver. I’m sorry.” I was determined to be firm on this point. I did not trust myself to have Oliver in my apartment, not even on the couch. “Look, if you need money for the hotel…”

“No, no! It’s not that. I just… I have an appointment.”

A chill went down my spine. “An appointment?”

I heard his breathing grow rough. He was silent for a moment. Then he said, so quietly I could barely hear it, “We didn’t use anything.”

“Oh.” _Oh, Oliver._

“That’s why I had to tell my wife. We were trying for a second baby and I couldn’t… not while there was a chance…”

“When’s your appointment?”

 

* * *

 

We met at a coffee shop across the road from the clinic, half an hour before he was due to go in. He arrived first, and I found him sitting at a table, staring blankly out of the window. He forced a smile when he saw me, but it quickly disappeared, as though he was too tired to keep the corners of his mouth lifted.

We sat in silence for a while. When Oliver eventually spoke, he said:

“It’s funny. All I’ve been able to think about is how disappointed your father would be, if he knew about all this. Not my father, yours. That summer… he treated me like I was his own son. He told me I was good, a good man.”

I smiled faintly as a memory crept to the forefront of my mind. “He said the same thing to me.”

“He was wrong.”

Oliver’s face contorted for a moment after he said it. He swallowed hard.

“I wanted to be good, more than anything. But I’m not. Not a good man. Not a good husband. Not a good father. Not a good son. Not a good friend to you…”

“Oliver, _stop_.” I reached across the table and grabbed his hand, desperate to comfort him, upset by his open self-loathing.

“What have I done, Elio? What have I done?”

I burst into tears.

That, at least, seemed to shock him out of his misery for a moment. He gaped at me as I grabbed a handful of napkins and pressed them to my face, trying to soak up the tears and stifle my sobs. In truth, I was perhaps even more terrified about Oliver’s appointment than I’d been about my own. This wasn’t the first time I’d accompanied someone to their test, and on one horrible occasion I had watched my friend walk back into the waiting room, and I could see on his face that he had received the worst news. His cheeks had been streaked with tears, and he had a kind of quiet, resigned horror in his eyes.

And now, very soon, I might see that same look on Oliver’s face.

People were staring.

“What’s the matter?” Oliver was asking me urgently. Then, suddenly his eyes widened. “Oh god. Oh god, are you…?”

I realized right away what he was asking. “No. No, no. I’m not.”

He let out a shuddering breath and lifted my hand in his, rested his forehead against it. “Thank god,” he said. “Thank god.”

It was a struggle to compose myself. I held the napkins to my face, soaking up the tears as fast as they flowed, until my head ached and it seemed I had finally run dry. When I dared look up again, Oliver was watching me with a complicated expression on his face.

“I’m sorry,” I managed at last.

“It’s OK.”

“No, really, I should probably be reassuring you and instead I’m…”

“You’re here. That’s all that matters.”

He went in to see the doctor alone. I offered to join him, but he shook his head and said he would be fine. Later, I realized that he probably didn’t want me to have to listen while he was quizzed on his sexual history. I thumbed through an old copy of the National Geographic - forcing myself to read an article about the Nile and hearing, like an echo in my mind, _The meaning of the river flowing is not that all things are changing_ …

After what seemed like an age, I saw Oliver emerge from the hallway where the doctors’ offices were - his green shirt catching my eye immediately.

His expression was hollow, vacant.

Dread crashed over me like a great wave. I stood up, the magazine sliding off my knees, forgotten, and falling to the ground.

“Oliver?”

“I have to come back in three months for the second test,” he said. “But…”

“It’s negative?”

“It’s negative.”

I collapsed against his chest, crying all over again. He held me tightly, and after a while I felt his mouth press against the top of my head, his warm breath in my hair.


	4. Chapter 4

I stopped sulking (because really, that’s what it was) after I went with Oliver for his first test. It was one thing to shun him when he had a wife and a baby and a house, but quite another to treat him coldly when he was living out of a hotel and facing the prospect of losing everything.

Oliver asked me to break the news to my parents. He said that he was too ashamed to do it himself, and that he trusted me to tell them the right way - no sugar-coating his actions, or apologizing for them, or minimizing what he had done. Still, I wasn’t surprised when my parents reacted simply with sadness for everyone involved.

“What a terrible thing,” my father said, as if I’d told him there’d been a death in the family. “Is there any hope of reconciliation between them?”

“Maybe,” Oliver had told me - sat in a cafe near the Conservatory, after my classes were done for the day. He stared out the window, his expression vacant, as though the shame had gutted him and left little behind. “She said she needs time to think. And I can’t move back in until I get the all-clear. I can’t risk Josh…” He covered his mouth suddenly, tears welling up in his eyes.

I hated to see him like this. “You’d probably be fine…”

“Probably isn’t good enough.” He shook his head. “I can’t even hold my son because I’m scared of accidentally infecting him, of _killing_ him. What kind of father am I?”

“Oliver, the test was negative…”

“Only the first test. I could still have it. I think maybe I deserve it.”

“ _Don’t_.” I was suddenly furious with him. “No one deserves it.”

“I know, I’m sorry, that was an awful thing to say.” He ran a hand through his hair wearily. “I just don’t know how to fix this.”

“Well, dying won’t fix anything.”

“It might help,” he said, forcing what he probably thought was a light-hearted smile, but which turned out more like a grimace. “I have a life insurance policy.”

(Later, I would pinpoint that as the moment when everything went wrong. Or at least, the moment at which I started down a path that would eventually lead to ruin.)

It frightened me - the way he talked so casually about the concept of his own death. I remembered the way he had looked almost disappointed when he came out of the doctor’s office after receiving the negative test results. It was terrible to think about, but I couldn’t help the images flashing through my mind: a maid coming in to change the sheets in his hotel room and finding him hanging from the ceiling, or bleeding out in the bathtub. Oliver _hated_ himself for what he had done, and I was afraid of how far that hatred might take him.

I told him to check out of the hotel, and to come and stay with me.

He demurred at first, of course - told me that he was fine, just fine, and apologized for being so dramatic. But I was aggressive in my insistence, and I could see how tempting the offer was. Oliver hated the cold seediness of the hotel. He needed to be in a home; if not his own, then someone else’s.

In the end I went back to his hotel with him, and he sat in the chair watching me placidly as I threw his clothes into his suitcase. He lacked the energy to fight me on the issue, and instead simply let himself be carried along like a dying man on a stretcher.

My apartment was cleaner than it had been the last time he was there. It was as though taking care of Oliver had led me to take care of myself as well, without really thinking about it. Oliver gave me the kind of purpose and direction that I hadn’t had in a long time. I told myself that I was just being a good friend, being the kind of man that my parents had raised me to be. I told myself that Oliver had no one else, that I was his only lifeline, that I had an obligation to help him

The first few weeks were blissful. Not for Oliver, obviously, who still carried the great weight of misery and shame with him. But for me… oh, it was heaven. To see his clothes mingled with mine in the laundry basket. To see his toothbrush and razor next to mine on the bathroom shelf. To make him coffee in the morning, and watch him mark papers in the evening out of the corner of my eye, as I sat curled up the couch with a book. It was sick, and a betrayal of the trust he’d placed in me by staying here, but I couldn’t help but fantasize that we were together, that Oliver had chosen me, that we had a life together.

It was a studio apartment, so we slept in the same room - me on the bed, him on the couch. It was so much better than sleeping next door to him and straining to hear the sounds coming from his room. I could open my eyes at night and see the slow rise and fall of his chest, the peacefulness of his brow, the lines of his stomach and legs under the blanket. I began to fantasize about Oliver getting divorced and then simply… staying. Moving in with me permanently. Moving from the couch to my bed. Wrapping his warm body around mine at night, and pressing his mouth against the nape of my neck.

Oliver was always somewhat inscrutable, but every now and then I fancied that I caught him looking at me with a similar longing. When I would play my guitar, I would see his whole body unwind and relax as though he couldn’t help it. He would close his eyes, his red pen hovering over some undergraduate paper on the works of Wittgenstein or Kierkegaard, and bathe in the music like a plant in sunlight, slowly coming back to life.

We didn’t talk a great deal - no long conversations deep into the night, like the ones we’d had when we were sleeping together. But one night, when I’d come home after a few drinks at the bar and was feeling brave, I asked Oliver a question I’d been wondering for a while.

“Oliver?”

“Yes.” He was in the couch, the blanket over his legs, reading a book.

“Are you gay?”

He looked up sharply. I flinched a little, withdrawing at the hardness of his gaze. He seemed to take a few long seconds to calm himself down, to see the question as a query instead of an attack. Then he looked back down at his book, as if the conversation was already over, and replied:

“No.”

Well. I had wondered perhaps if that was what had pushed him to cheat on his wife - but then, plenty of straight men cheat on their wives with other women. I suddenly wanted to know more about the student that Oliver had slept with. What was it about him, that had tempted Oliver to stray? Had Oliver been in love with him? Did Oliver still long for him? Had they slept together since, or had they only crashed together for that one night?

I wanted to ask all of this, but wisely I decided that I’d asked my share of inappropriate questions for one day.

The day of the second test came. Oliver didn’t ask me to come with him this time, but I went anyway. Even though the likelihood of a false negative on the first test was low, I was almost as anxious this time around as I had been the first.

Oliver didn’t waste time when he re-emerged. “Negative,” he said, calmly.

Thankfully I didn’t cry this time. “Thank god,” I sighed.

We went out for a drink to celebrate, though it was a muted celebration. Oliver still seemed troubled - gazing down into his drink like it held the answers to all his problems. Then, during a lull in the conversation, he said something that caught me completely off guard.

“You’ve been very kind to me.”

The word took me back to that summer - Oliver lying by the pool, mocking his own writing. And just as I had done back then, I looked at him in bemusement and asked, “Kind?”

“Yes. I don’t know what I’d have done, if you weren’t around. I felt like I was falling down a well, watching the circle of daylight get smaller and farther away with every second. It seemed like everything was over. Then you showed up and… I don’t know. Kept me sane, I suppose.”

Even though he was thanking me, he looked infinitely sad. In a fit of boldness, I reached out and laid my hand on his arm.

“We were friends,” I said. “Before we were anything else..”

Finally, he smiled. And I smiled back. And if I were a better person, that’s where I would have left it.

We walked back to my apartment, both a little tipsy, not talking much. When we got in, he went to brush his teeth. I took off my jeans and sweater and laid down on my bed, on top of the covers, staring up at the ceiling and idly rubbing my cock through my boxers in the way I often did when alcohol had warmed my desire. I heard the tap stop running, and moved my hand away.

Oliver came out, likewise in just his underwear and a shirt. He saw me and paused, just staring for a moment. I wondered what I looked like - splayed out on the bed, half-hard, my arms and legs and a sliver of my stomach on display.

I sat up.

“Come here,” I commanded, softly.

Oliver’s face crumpled a little, as if to say, _Oh no, don’t ask me that, don’t ask me to do that when you know I won’t be able to do anything but obey_. But obey he did, walking over to the bed, standing just in front of me.

I looked up at him - his strong jaw and straight nose, his tanned skin and blue eyes, his troubled mouth and, some way below it, the Star of David resting in the curls of his chest hair, exposed by his slightly unbuttoned shirt. And I thought, _Elio, Elio, Elio, Elio, Elio, Elio, Elio_.

I surged upwards, like an alligator bursting up out of muddy water to seize its prey. I flung my arms around Oliver’s neck and moaned as our mouths connected, pressing my body flush against his, grabbing fistfuls of his shirt. I half-expected him to push me away, but he resisted only for a surprised second before pulling me close, kissing me hungrily, making soft and desperate noises in the back of his throat that eventually manifested as a word mumbled against my lips.

“Oliver...”

 _Yes_ , I thought, giddy with delight. _Yes_. “Elio…”

I made love to him. I had not made love to anyone _since_ him, not really. I was so, so careful - pressing him open with my fingers first, getting him wet, then settling between his legs and gently easing my way inside his body while he threw his head back and groaned like he was dying, like this would kill him. I nearly forgot about my own pleasure entirely, I was so caught up in pursuing his - showing him everything I had learned over the years, showing him how well I remembered his body and what he liked. By the time he finished, he was actually sobbing, incoherent, spilling all over himself like he didn’t even realize he was doing it.

He wrapped his arms around me tightly. I pressed my forehead against his and my breath stuttered as I came inside him, filling the condom that we’d both silently agreed to use. It emptied from me like a wave - like five years of pent-up longing released in a single effusion. When it was over I closed my eyes dreamily and let my whole weight come to rest on Oliver’s body, feeling his hands stroking my back, feeling him turn his head to bury his face against my throat.

His hair always smelled so good after we’d had sex. I breathed in the smell of it, and exhaled it in the form of words. “I missed this, Oliver.”

There were several long seconds of silence. Then he said, so quietly that I wouldn’t have been able to hear it if his mouth wasn’t so close to my ear, “I missed it, too.”

He said the words carefully, tentatively, as though he was afraid they might sound like a promise. I wanted to tell him, _You don’t need to promise me anything, Oliver. I don’t need a ring, or a house, or a baby. I just need you, here, in my bed. I just need to be inside you and feel you inside me and on top of me and beneath me and everywhere. I just need your skin and your hair and the way your voice breaks when you feel good and the way you look at me. Just give me that, and everything else is inconsequential._


	5. Chapter 5

When I woke up, the first thing I saw was Oliver’s packed suitcase.

I waited for surprise or confusion to wash over me, but neither arrived. In a way, I had known this would happen from the moment I asked Oliver to come and stay with me. I had let my desire lead the way and now I was being punished for it. And I knew as I lay there, still feigning sleep, that it would hurt so much more this time.

The bed dipped next to me. I felt a warm hand on my shoulder.

“Elio.”

I closed my eyes again. “Just go,” I instructed dully.

He was silent for a moment, his thumb rubbing the top of my bicep. At last he said, “I wish I didn’t have to.”

“You don’t have to. But you are.”

“My son took his first steps, and I wasn’t there. I can’t let him grow up without a father, Elio. I have responsibilities. I need to start doing the right thing…”

“Get out of my apartment, Oliver.”

Behind me, I heard a soft, sad huff of breath. “I do love you,” he told me. “You were there for me when no one else was, because you care for me unconditionally. But I need the conditions, Elio. They’re the only thing that keep me good.”

My face twisted bitterly. “Well, here’s a condition. If you walk out of that door, I never want to see you again. Don’t call me. Don’t come over here. Don’t visit my parents in the summer. I don’t care if things don’t work out. If you cheat again, if you get divorced, if you’re dying - I don’t care. If you leave me again, we’re nothing to each other.”

 

* * *

 

He left me again.

Shortly after Oliver departed, I broke my hand. He’d missed one of his socks while he was packing and I stared at it where it lay limply, half-hidden under the couch. Then I clenched my right hand into a fist and slammed it into the wall with all my strength.

It was an outside wall, a masonry wall, so the blow didn’t even leave a mark on it save for the smear of blood as the skin on my knuckles ruptured. The pain was immediate and all-encompassing. I let out a delayed, agonized yelp, clutching my bloodied hand to my chest, trying and failing to move my fingers, tears running down my cheeks.

I didn’t go to the hospital right away. I sat on the couch for about an hour - the place where Oliver had slept for the past two months - and cradled my swelling hand as waves of sickening pain crashed over and over me, savoring the white noise of it. It occurred to me that I might never again be able to play the guitar or the piano with that hand, and I didn’t care, because at that moment I felt sure I’d never want to make music again.

The doctor hissed through her teeth when I unwrapped my hand from the towel and showed it to her. She took an X-ray and I stared at the white lines of fractures, at the broken line of the central metacarpal. I sat there, blank-faced, as she applied the cast, binding three of my fingers together, encasing my skin in a hard shell.

The doctor gave me a prescription for strong painkillers and I took three of them as I was still leaving the pharmacy, craving the fuzzy-headedness of the over-medicated. I thought about taking my college counselor up on that referral and getting a bottle of antidepressants too. Where once I had shied away from numbness, now I craved it like a lover. My father’s sage advice seemed distant now, irrelevant. I wanted to feel nothing - nothing at all.

Much later, I would come to accept that none of this was Oliver’s fault. He had come to my bed in a moment of weakness, true, but I had taken advantage of his loneliness and his misery and his dependence upon me. Had he stayed, we would not have been happy together. He would have come to resent me for driving a wedge between himself and his family. The guilt over abandoning his son would have eaten away at him and turned him into a bitter, angry wreck - a shell of the man I had fallen in love with. If he had stayed, there would have been no happy ending for either of us. In retrospect, that was clear.

At the time, I hated him. And it nearly destroyed me.

I quit my degree. I quit my job. I canceled my lease, put my things in storage, withdrew all of my savings and fled the country with no plans and a considerable stash of painkillers. I went to Italy, since I had dual citizenship and could stay there for as long as I wished. I didn’t tell anyone where I was going.

My hand ached inside its cast. I still didn’t know if it would work properly again when I took the cast off. I could have stayed in the family home, which was currently empty, but instead I took myself to the Aosta Valley, near the French and Swiss borders. I rented a cheap, poorly insulated cabin, and when I closed the door behind me I felt free for the first time since leaving Boston.

Those first few weeks, I subsisted mainly on alcohol and painkillers. Eventually I ran out of the painkillers, and spent several long nights shivering through withdrawals, my body purging itself of what little food there was inside it.

None of this was Oliver’s fault.

This was who I was - who I had always been, even before I met him. Strong-willed, dramatic, obsessed with day-dreaming, gripped by wild swings of emotion. I had recognized aspects of myself in people whom I admired - Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, Frédéric Chopin - and many of those whom I admired were people whose lives had been afflicted with misery and addiction. I wondered if it was inherited - if my parents had felt the same way at some point in their lives, and found a way to deal with it. To survive.

There was a doctor in the nearby town, but in the end I removed the cast from my hand myself - soaking it in hot water and vinegar and spending several hours painstakingly peeling off the layers. Once it was free, I flexed it experimentally. The joints were stiff and aching, and I could no longer make a tight fist.

I stayed in the Aosta Valley for eight long months. Through the bitter winter, when the snow piled up outside the door and the wind whistled in through the cracks around the windows as I shivered by the fire. I hadn’t shaved since leaving Boston, and my beard grew in as though it was anxious to protect me from the cold. I would wrap myself in layers and go for long walks in the terrifying beauty of the Alps. And, slowly, I started to heal.

It could have easily gone the other way. More than once, in the darkest of days, I contemplated walking out of the door, into the snow, and walking until I could walk no more. Walking into the mountains and freezing where my body would never be found, where it would be covered in snow and become part of the landscape. But instead I chopped firewood, the grip of my broken hand on the axe gradually becoming stronger over time, and fed the fire until it defiantly warmed the tiny cabin. I taped up the drafts around the windows. I shoveled snow from the door. I battled the Aosta Valley’s winter like it was a great nemesis, my white whale.

I subsisted on a diet of the five books I’d brought with me, and the writing supplies that I bought on my occasional visits to the town. I sometimes wondered what the locals thought of me - this strange, bearded hermit who had arrived with the rest of the tourists and then refused to leave, emerging only to stock up on food and pencils and thick pads of paper. I wrote pages and pages and pages of music that I could not play, humming the notes to hear them aloud, wishing I had an instrument to play them on. I bought tapes of classical music from tourist shops, slotted them into my Walkman and transcribed them by ear.

As the snow began to melt away, small and sturdy Alpine flowers emerged from beneath it, washing the valley in color. I had been living thriftily - spending money only on rent, food supplies, firewood and writing materials - but nonetheless I had burned through my savings. I began to come to terms with the fact that I could not hide out here forever. Sooner or later, I would have to return and face the music. Apologize to my parents, who had no idea where I was or if I was alright. Get a job. Build a life. Figure out who I was going to be.

I left the Aosta Valley in the spring of 1989. It was the Easter holidays, and I knew my parents would be at the villa, so I took four buses and three trains to get to Crema. On the last leg of the journey, I looked out of the window as the landscape started to become familiar. I saw places that I’d visited with Oliver, and my chest tightened at the intensity of the memories. Despite myself, I wondered if he had managed to save his marriage. If he was living a happy life that did not involve me at all. If he and his wife were trying for a second child again, or already expecting.

The villa was several miles from the town, and I had no bike, so for the first time I walked the roads that I’d normally sped down. I took in the budding trees, and the flowers, and the startled wildlife that darted away as I walked past. My shoulder ached from the weight of my duffel bag.

It was early evening by the time I made it to the house. Mafalda was the first person to spot me. It was warm outside, and she was setting the table for dinner (four places, I realized - my parents must have guests staying). She looked up as I approached, and I saw her startle a little. It took me a moment to realize that she did not recognize me with a beard, especially since it had been a while since my last visit.

I smiled at her tentatively. “Buona sera, Mafalda.”

She gasped and, like something out of an old movie or a cartoon, actually dropped the plate she’d been holding. It slid off the edge of the table and crashed to the ground, smashing into pieces, but she barely noticed. She rushed forward and wrapped her sinewy arms around me and hugged me fiercely, scolding me all the while, then pushing me away and grabbing me by the beard and lashing me with accusations, telling me how worried she’d been, and demanding to know what I was smiling about, and then hugging me all over again.

Over her shoulder, I caught sight of Anchise, who was working on my father’s car. He grinned slightly and nodded at me. I winked at him.

The commotion had drawn people out of the house. I saw my mother emerge from the kitchen door, and as soon as she saw me she covered her mouth. My father stumbled out behind her, and gripped her shoulders tightly, neither of them moving closer just yet.

It occurred to me that it was embarrassingly Christian of me - to return like this at Easter, of all holidays. Especially with a beard. The whole scene probably looked like something out of a stained glass window. I’d never be able to show my face at temple again.

My amusement and elation were short-lived, however, because someone else followed my parents out of the house. One of their dinner guests, I assumed, when I first saw the movement behind them. Then the person stepped out from behind them, and I realized that she looked vaguely familiar, that I had seen her somewhere before, that lovely face and dark hair…

 _Oh no_ , I thought, very clearly. I knew where I had met her before. In Boston, outside the fundraiser. And if Oliver’s wife was here, that could only mean…

He stepped out of the house, following everyone else’s gaze.

We locked eyes.

_Oliver._


	6. Chapter 6

I lay back in a bath full of steaming hot water, my eyes closed, savoring the heat as it soaked into my aching muscles. My cabin had only had a shower with terrible water pressure, and since I rarely saw other people I’d foregone washing for much of my time in the Aosta Valley. It felt good to be wrapped up in this warmth, sluicing the dirt from my skin. It felt like being born again.

The bath was as much about hiding as it was about getting clean. I hadn’t said much since returning. I’d apologized to my parents for worrying them, and winced when I learned that a missing person’s report had been filed. It hadn’t gotten very far - as soon as the police discovered that I’d quit my job, ended my tenancy, and voluntarily got on a flight to Italy, they had closed the case and told my parents they’d need to approach the Italian authorities if they wanted to pursue me any further.

I hadn’t spoken a word to Oliver since arriving, nor even looked him in the eye aside from that first shocked moment. He had hovered nearby while my parents crowded around me, with his arms folded across his chest and his hands tucked under his armpits. His wife, perhaps sensing the tense atmosphere and feeling like an outsider, had excused herself to go and put their son to sleep.

He was in the room next door - Oliver’s son. Josh. In my old room, which still had my posters up and some of my books left in it. I tried to picture myself - seventeen and languishing on the sheets that Oliver and I had ruined, and wondered what that version of myself would have thought if he’d known that just a few years down the line, in a cot a few feet away from the bed, Oliver’s son would be sleeping. A son from another life, from a marriage, from a family that was nothing to do with me.

I heard the floorboards creaking outside. A heavy silence. Then, his voice.

“Elio?”

I opened my eyes slowly. I reached out to my own body, to my heart, to see what it felt, and found very little. Perhaps I was too tired to conjure up any real care and emotion.

“In here,” I said. What did it matter if I was naked? It was nothing he hadn’t seen before.

During the moment of hesitation that followed, I hunched over in the bath, curving my spine, and reached for the big plastic cup that stood on the stool next to the bath. I scooped up some hot water and poured it over my head, feeling it soak through my hair, saturating it, dripping from the strands. I repeated the action as the door creaked open, and closed noisily despite Oliver’s efforts to be quiet. The doors in this house were always so loud.

I heard the soft _clunk_ of him putting the toilet seat down, saw him sit on it beyond the fringe of my dripping hair. I dunked my whole head under the water briefly, then surged back up out of water, pushing the hair back from my face so that it lay slick against my head. I had attacked it with scissors a few times during my stay in the cabin, but it was still quite long.

There was tension in the air. Oliver was probably waiting for me to shout at him - to demand to know why he was there, when I had expressly told him not to visit this place again. He probably had some kind of witty retort prepared, like, _You only told me that I couldn’t visit them in the summer_. But I was too tired to rage at him, and cared too little.

He finally spoke.

“Where were you?”

I wiped a hand down my face, clearing the water from my eyes, and scrubbed it through my beard. I hadn’t yet told anyone where I’d been since I disappeared. It felt important to keep it a secret - to have a mystery that I could protect.

After a few seconds of silence, Oliver spoke again.

“You were gone for a year.”

Oh, he knew me too well. That statement was a trick to get me to break my silence. I had to forcibly clamp down on the impulse to correct him like the smartass that he knew I was, and tell him it had only been eight months. When it became apparent that his gambit had failed, he made a noise of frustration.

“I didn’t even know if you were alive.”

I stood up, the water streaming down my body, and Oliver leaned back a little as though startled by the sudden movement. I stepped out of the bath and grabbed a towel from the rail, wrapping it around my waist, then grabbed another, smaller towel to scrub my hair.

“I know I have no right to be angry. But your parents do, Elio. They won’t tell you how worried they were, but I saw them go through it and what you did to them… it was cruel. They didn’t do anything to deserve that.”

I felt a hot flush of shame rush through my body, but still I didn’t say anything. I walked over to the steamed-up bathroom mirror, wiped the the towel over it to clear it a little, then laid the towel down over the sink. I picked up a pair of scissors from the little cup of grooming tools on the edge of the sink, grabbed a hunk of my beard, and began sawing through the strands. Hair fell in dark, curly clumps onto the white expanse of the towel.

Then, quieter. “Are you OK?”

I stared at my own reflection in the mirror, obscured by misted glass and pearls of water. I looked calm. _Well_ , I thought, replying to the question in my own mind. _I’m alive_.

 

* * *

 

Playing the piano was more difficult now than it had been. My skill hadn’t been diminished much, but my stamina had. After five minutes my joints would start to ache and stiffen, and I had to massage my hand and carefully clench and flex it to ease to the pain and regain movement.

As I was waiting for the functionality of my hand to return, I looked out of the window by the fireplace, and caught sight of Oliver’s son for the first time. He had slept through breakfast - a somewhat chilly affair, during which my parents mainly chatted to Oliver’s wife (her name was Elaine, and she didn’t seem to know quite what to make of me), while Oliver and I brooded in silence, not looking at one another.

Now they were standing outside - Oliver and Elaine and Josh. They looked like something out of a magazine. The perfect, photogenic American family. Oliver, tall and masculine. Elaine, lovely and dark-haired. And the baby - one half of each of them, with mid-brown hair and large eyes and red cheeks, dressed in a little striped shirt and shorts, blowing bubbles around his fist and grinning.

It should have driven me wild with jealousy, but instead something strange happened: I finally made peace with it. Oh, I still wanted Oliver, desperately and profoundly, but when I saw the way he smiled down at his son I realized that I would never be enough for Oliver. I was a temptation for him, a test, like a will-o’-the-wisp designed to lead him off the firm ground and into marshy waters. I couldn’t have him without destroying him, and I loved him too much for that.

But on the heels of that peace came another realization. Letting go of Oliver meant that I would be stranded in the bog myself, a sacrifice at the altar of him, doomed to watch him retreat to safety. I wanted to believe that I would one day feel the same way about someone else that I felt about him, but I lacked much confidence in the idea.

I touched my fingers to the keys, and started playing again.

A figure moved into the doorway. I looked up. My father offered me a smile that didn’t reach his eyes and approached the piano, looking down at my fingers as they danced across the keys.

“I missed hearing you play,” he said gently. “It’s been a long time.”

The music trailed away.

“I’m sorry, Dad.”

He didn’t say anything at first - just dropped a hand onto my shoulder. I looked up at him. He had more grey in his beard now than when I had last seen him, and he had lost some weight. I felt a pang of guilt in my chest. A simple postcard would have been enough to relieve him of his worry, but as always I had been too caught up in my own drama, too selfish to consider him or my mother in the midst of my misery.

“Do you mind that we invited Oliver and Elaine?” he asked, watching my face carefully.

I shrugged. “It’s your house.”

“So you do mind.”

“A little, I suppose.”

“He was very worried about you. He was actually the one who filed the police report, when you disappeared.”

I glanced out the window. Oliver and his family were gone.

“I told him I never wanted to see him again.”

“Did you mean it?”

“I did at the time.”

“And now?”

_And now, and now, and now…_

I stared down at the piano keys.

“I think he’s done with me.”

My father didn’t respond to that. He patted my shoulder, and then tucked his fingers under my chin, feeling my smooth jaw. “Shame you got rid of the beard,” he said wryly. “For a moment there we looked like twins.”

I managed a laugh - the first one in a long, long time. “It was kind of nice. Kept my face warm. But when I got back here it started to feel itchy. Like the house didn’t recognize me with it or something.”

“This place doesn’t like change,” he agreed. “It’s one of the things I love about it. All of this…” He gestured vaguely at our surroundings. “It looked much the same a hundred years ago. And a hundred years before that. And a hundred years before that.”

“When I inherit it,” I said. “I’m going to turn it into a McMansion.”

“Don’t!” my father laughed, scandalized. “It can hear you.”

I raised my voice, spreading my arms wide. “This is going to be the garage. All these paintings are going to auction, and I’ll put up modern art everywhere. It’ll just be random colorful shapes. A blue triangle and a red square and a yellow line and that’s it, that’s the painting.”

“Alright, I’m going to tell your mother to change the will. We’ll leave the place to Mafalda instead. Lord knows she can be trusted to take care of it.”

I smiled at the thought of it - Mafalda running the house, putting her feet up and being waited on by servants of her own. It was a nice thought.

Then the smile slid from my face. Looking back down I asked my father, quietly, “Are you disappointed in me?”

“No,” he replied, almost before I’d finished asking the question. He brought his hand down to rest on my shoulder, the back of my neck. “Never. I’ve never thought it my place to be disappointed in you, or even proud of you. Neither has your mother. We brought you into this world and raised you as best we could, but your life was a gift. To do with whatever you wanted.”

I was dissatisfied with the answer - it felt like just a roundabout way of telling me he _was_ disappointed. After all, there was nothing Jewish parents loved more than to tell their children how disappointed they were in oblique ways. But my mother and father had never much fit the stereotype, so I forcibly squashed down my defensiveness.

“I broke my hand,” I offered - a small tribute, in lieu of an answer to the question of where I’d been all those months. I showed him the hand, flexed the fingers. “It’s healed OK, but it hurts if I play for too long.”

“Hm.” My father picked up my hand gently, inspected it as though he could see the damage inside, carefully pressing between the knuckles. “Your cousin Anthony is a physiotherapist. A good one too, from what I understand.”

Anthony lived in Boston. I tensed a little at the implication of my father’s suggestion.

“I don’t know if I want to move back there,” I said bluntly. The mental image of taking all my things out of storage seemed synonymous with unpacking everything else I had run away from. “I don’t know what I want to do.”

“Well, you graduated from one of the most prestigious music schools in the country. Your choices aren’t exactly limited…”

“I don’t want to do anything,” I interrupted. “I just want to lie around and wallow some more.” I didn’t need to say the cause for my wallowing. He already knew.

“Ah,” my father huffed, amused. “Well, you know I’m a fan of wallowing. Without it many of the greatest art pieces in the world wouldn’t exist. I don’t know that it will make you happy, though.”

I was about to respond when Oliver walked in from the garden. He had his hands in his pockets and a determined expression on his face, but he forced a tight smile when he saw my father.

“Professor,” he greeted. “Would you mind if I had a private word with Elio?”

“Of course,” my father replied gently, ruffling my hair. “I think he could do with a talking-to. Unfortunately I’ve never been much good at them.”

“Well, I’m hoping this will be a talking-with rather than a talking-to.”

I finally looked up at him, my eyes narrowed. If he wanted to do this, then I was ready.

“Let’s talk.”


	7. Chapter 7

“Did I not make myself absolutely clear?” I inquired, slowly.

“I did what you asked,” Oliver countered, in a way that made me suspect he’d prepared for this talk. “Everything that you had a right to ask me, I did.”

“Everything I had a right to,” I repeated.

“I didn’t call. I didn’t come over. At least… not until your parents called me, to ask if I knew where you were, because they hadn’t been able to reach you. Everything that I did, I did for them. You can shut me out, Elio, but I care a great deal about your parents, and they care about me. You can’t ask us to stop being friends.”

“I _told_ you not to come back here.”

“You had no right to do that.”

 _No right._ All the peace I’d felt upon seeing him with his family was gone, and I was seething. I glared at him so fiercely from where I was sat at the piano that he actually backed up a step, raised his hands as though I had pointed a gun at him.

“Elio…”

“I _hate_ you.”

He flinched. His expression tightened, as though he was making a great effort to keep himself under control. Slowly, he lowered his hands, and walked over to one of the green armchairs, and sat down. I couldn’t help but remember the last time we’d been here, just like this: me at the piano, him sitting down and letting the music wash over him. I wished more than anything that we could go back there; things had seemed complicated then, but I now realized that they were so, so simple.

“I don’t hate you,” I admitted quietly. “I just wish that I did.”

He nodded, understanding. “It would make things easier, wouldn’t it?”

“Do you wish that you never loved me?” I was curious.

“No,” Oliver replied immediately. “Even with how awful things have gotten, loving you is one of the best things that ever happened to me. I’ve never regretted it, not for a second. Only how I handled it.”

I glanced towards the door. “Things don’t seem that awful,” I commented. “You’re back with your family…”

Oliver laughed - a hollow, unamused sound. “My wife and I are sleeping in separate bedrooms back home. Elaine thinks I’m gay.”

“Have you tried telling her that you’re not?”

“I’ve tried. She doesn’t believe me. And every time I try to… she thinks it’s just out of obligation. Or pity.” Oliver stared off into the middle distance. “I don’t think she wants to be married to me any more.”

I _despised_ the way the words kindled a flicker of hope in my chest. “I can’t really blame her,” I said coldly.

Oliver didn’t take offense though; merely nodded, as though he was in full agreement. He was silent for a moment, looking down at his hands. Then he said, “I really did try to let you go. I told myself that I was going to leave you alone to your life, to whatever you chose to make of it. But then you disappeared, and all I could think about was how we’d left things, and that you might be dead - that you might have died thinking that I don’t care about you.” He looked up at me, his expression desperately earnest. “And I do. Care.”

I was sick of it - sick of being told that he cared about me with words, while his actions said otherwise. So I lashed out. “I thought about killing myself,” I told him, just to see the look of devastation on his face. “A few times, actually. While I was gone. It would have been so easy, and being alive is so hard.”

Oliver looked like I’d stabbed him in the chest - or rather, like he’d just watched me stab myself. “Elio…” he began, but couldn’t seem to continue. Suddenly I felt ashamed.

“I never actually did anything,” I added hurriedly, already regretting being so open. “Just thought about it. Everyone thinks about it sometimes…”

“Don’t,” Oliver cut in. “Don’t try and spare me. I don’t deserve that. If you… _fuck_.” He dashed a tear from his eye angrily, and took a steadying breath. His voice was even deeper when he spoke again, thick with emotion. “If you want me to leave now, really leave, I will. I can… I can cut ties with your parents, tell them something that will make them understand. Whatever you need…”

“Oh my god, _shut up._ I only told you to stay away because I’m _sick_ of you leaving me,” I snapped at him. “Every time you come back to me I’m so happy, and every time you leave it rips my fucking heart out.” My voice was shaking. “Now you’re offering to leave me again like it’s some big favor. So don’t ask me if I want you to leave because I _never_ want you to leave, I never wanted that, but you did it anyway, and you’re going to do it again, so don’t ask me for permission just so you can feel better about it!”

I was yelling now. Probably the whole house could hear me. I brought myself back under control with great care.

“You have to choose, Oliver,” I said, speaking in a lecturing tone, as though he was one of my students who had been turning in sub-par work. “You can’t leave again and then come running back as soon as it seems like I’m in trouble, because I’m _going_ to get in trouble again. I might get into hard drugs, or alcohol, or date someone that I really shouldn’t, or become HIV positive, or run away again, or even try to kill myself. You’ve got to accept that these are all things that might happen, and that none of them are excuses for you to come back.”

Oliver had been nodding throughout the speech, like he didn’t know he was doing it. When it was clear that I was finished, he cleared his throat, then asked, huskily, “And if I were to stay?”

It wasn’t what I had been expecting him to say, but I blinked at him in surprise for only a moment before replying. “If you stay,” I said. “I’m going to get in trouble again. I’m not going to automatically be happy for the rest of my life just because you’re around. But you will be around.”

He considered this silently. He looked out of the window, perhaps thinking of his wife and his son, who were out there somewhere. I braced for him to say, definitively, that he was going to leave, and leave for good this time. But when he spoke again, all he said was:

“I need time.”

I sighed, irritated. “You’ve _had_ time.”

“Please, Elio. Every bad decision I’ve ever made has been something that I rushed into. Let me think this over.”

I rolled my eyes, considered his plea, and then said, “June 25th. You can have until June 25th.”

Oliver smiled a little. “Why June 25th?”

“Because ‘time’ is too vague, and I don’t usually have much going on in June.”

“OK. That’s fair.”

“Yes. It is.”

We regarded each other carefully from across the room - like two characters in a Western who were pointing guns at each other, and had just negotiated a peaceful resolution, yet neither wanted to be the first to lower their gun. We both jumped when Mafalda rang the bell for lunch.

 

* * *

 

I moved back to Boston, and applied for another teaching assistant position. I had no interest in resuming my degree, however; I felt that I’d had quite enough of being a student. While I waited for the new school year to start in the fall, I organized all of my notes from my time in the Aosta Valley and started playing the music that I’d written while I was out there. I made an appointment with my cousin and he sorted out a treatment program for my hand, giving me exercises to strengthen it and restore flexibility.

“You’re lucky the break happened while you were young,” he told me. “It’ll be easier for you to bounce back.”

Oddly, I did not think about Oliver much in the interim months. Knowing that his decision had a date on it made things easier. It meant that I was not constantly waiting for the phone to ring, or waiting for a knock at the door. Occasionally I wondered what he was doing - if he had worked things out with his wife, if they were still living together, if they were sleeping together again. But I felt at peace with the fact that things were out of my hands now. Whatever Oliver did, it would be his own choice.

The evening of June 24th rolled around. I was trying to take my mind off things - playing a fiddly little guitar piece that I’d composed, and occasionally cursing my still-stiff fingers for not obeying my wishes. I’d moved to a smaller apartment, on the top floor of a building, with sloping ceilings and a small balcony where I would sit on warm evenings, reading or writing or practising my music.

I lost track of time, and didn’t realize how late it had gotten until I heard a knock at the door and frowned, looking at my watch.

It was midnight.

I stopped breathing for a second or two.

There was another knock at the door.

I shifted my papers off my knees and stood up from the couch, approaching the door like it was some wild animal. I leaned my forehead against it for a moment and just breathed, my hand on the handle, imagining another forehead pressed to the other side of the door, barely an inch away.

I opened the door.

Oliver was out of breath from climbing the stairs, but he was smiling.

“You didn’t say what time…”

I dragged him through the doorway, crashing my mouth against his, cradling his head. He kissed me back, desperately, making soft noises in the back of his throat. He broke away briefly, and panted:

“I decided…”

“I know,” I said impatiently. “I know.”

 

* * *

 

Later, much later, we lay entwined in my bed, my head on Oliver’s chest, listening to his heartbeat. He stroked his fingers idly through my hair, his other hand resting on the bare, damp skin of my back.

“I was in the mountains,” I murmured sleepily. “The Aosta Valley.”

He knew immediately which period of time I was referring to. “What’s it like there?” he asked softly, the words rumbling in his chest, vibrating against my cheek.

“It’s peaceful. Cold, but peaceful.”

His hands caressed me, slowly, thoughtfully. “Do you want to go back?”

I smiled, and his chest hair tickled my nostrils. “Maybe one day,” I said. “But I like it here, in Boston.”


End file.
